The dawn after the Lazy Immortal Festival did not arrive with its usual gentle grace. It felt hesitant, the light bleeding reluctantly into a sky the color of bruised plums. The village square, still littered with the detritus of celebration—discarded lazy-cake crumbs, overturned cups of spirit cola—now held the tense atmosphere of a military encampment. The captured Crow, whom the villagers had dubbed "Silent Feathers" due to his refusal to speak and his dark, cloak-like appearance, was locked in the stone storage shed normally used for housing spirit-turnips through the winter. Two of the village's strongest men, including a grim-faced Wei Tiezhu, stood guard outside, their makeshift weapons looking pathetic against the memory of the shadow-dagger.
The festive willow crown, now slightly wilted, lay forgotten on the steps of the ancestral hall. The Horizontal Immortal was no longer a figure of fun; he was a paradox. Wei Xiao'ou sat on those very steps, slowly eating a bowl of congee, seemingly oblivious to the frantic energy around him. His every lazy slurp was a counterpoint to the village's anxiety.
Wei Tiezhu watched him from across the square, his thoughts a turbulent storm. The sequence of events was burned into his mind: the crash, the tension, the landslide, Xiao'ou's return. Coincidence? The word felt flimsy, a paper shield against a growing avalanche of doubt. He remembered the broken leg of the Crow—a clean, brutal break. He remembered Xiao'ou's casual comment about the fence's resonant frequency. He remembered a dozen other small, impossible things over the years. The pieces were there, but the picture they formed was too incredible to comprehend.
"He knows something," Tiezhu muttered to his grandfather as Wei San approached, his face etched with new lines of worry.
"He knows that congee is better when it's warm," Wei San replied, his voice neutral. "And that the world is full of mysteries best not poked with a stick."
"Grandfather, be serious! That… that thing in the shed! The girl's story! This is beyond us. We're rice farmers, not… not demon hunters!"
"We are the Wei Clan," the old man said, his voice gaining a steely undertone Tiezhu rarely heard. "We have survived for ninety-nine generations in a world that would rather we were fertilizer. We adapt. We endure. And sometimes," he added, his eyes flicking towards Xiao'ou, "we nap while the heavens themselves scheme around us."
Before Tiezhu could formulate a response, the door to the ancestral hall creaked open. Yun Lian stood there, leaning against the frame. She looked fragile, the violet of her eyes stark against the pallor of her skin, but there was a fierce resilience in her stance. She had traded her torn silks for a set of Aunt Hong's spare work clothes, and the simple, sturdy fabric made her look both younger and more determined.
"He will not talk," she said, her voice still hoarse but clear. "The Crows are trained to withstand torture, spiritual probing, anything. Their minds are fortresses of silence. You could break every bone in his body and he would only thank you for the distraction from his failure."
"Then what do we do?" Tiezhu asked, frustration boiling over. "We can't just keep him in the turnip shed! What if his friends come?"
"They will," Yun Lian stated flatly. "This one was a scout, a Feeder-Class Crow. Its purpose was to confirm the box's presence and assess defenses. Its silence is a message in itself. The next ones will be Killers. They will not be so… clumsy." Her gaze swept over the village, over the worried faces of the farmers. "You are not prepared."
A heavy silence fell over the square. The truth of her words was a physical weight.
It was then that a soft, rhythmic tap… tap… tap broke the stillness.
Wei Xiao'ou had finished his congee. He set the bowl aside, picked up his rusty umbrella, and was using it as a walking stick, idly tapping the flagstones of the path as he ambled towards the turnip shed.
"Xiao'ou! Stay back!" Tiezhu ordered, his protective instincts surging.
Xiao'ou ignored him. He stopped before the two guards, who looked at him, then at Tiezhu, uncertain.
"I'd like to see the prisoner," Xiao'ou said, his tone as casual as if he were asking to borrow a hoe.
"Absolutely not!" Tiezhu strode forward, blocking his path. "This is not a game! This is a dangerous cultivator! A demon!"
"He's just a man with a broken leg in a shed full of turnips," Xiao'ou replied, his eyes mild. "And he looks lonely. I thought I might talk to him."
Yun Lian let out a short, bitter laugh. "Talk? You cannot talk to a Crow. Their language is not one of words. It is of whispers and hunger."
Xiao'ou's gaze shifted to her. For a moment, his lazy mask seemed to thin, and she felt a jolt, as if she'd just brushed against something vast and impossibly old. "Every creature has a language," he said softly. "Even silence speaks. You just have to know how to listen."
He stepped around his sputtering cousin and nodded to the guards. "If he tries anything, I'll poke him with my umbrella. I'm very good at poking things."
Baffled, and perhaps secretly hoping the lazybones would get a scare that would finally wake him up, the guards shuffled aside. Tiezhu moved to stop him, but a firm hand on his arm from Wei San held him back.
"Let him," the old man whispered, his eyes intent.
Xiao'ou opened the heavy wooden door and slipped inside, closing it behind him. The square held its breath.
—
The inside of the shed was cool and dark, smelling of earth, old vegetables, and the coppery tang of blood. The Crow was propped against the far wall, his broken leg splinted roughly with two planks and strips of cloth. His hood had been removed, revealing a face that was gaunt and pale, with features so nondescript they were almost painful to look at. His eyes were the color of a dead sky. They held no pain, no fear, no anger. Only a profound, weary emptiness.
He watched as Wei Xiao'ou entered. He did not see a cultivator. He saw a mortal boy, his spiritual aura a faint, muddy flicker. A non-entity. The Crow's assessment was absolute. This was no interrogation. This was… irrelevance.
Xiao'ou didn't approach him. He instead wandered over to a basket of last season's spirit-turnips, picked one up, and examined it critically.
"A bit shriveled," he mused aloud. "The Qi was weak last winter. Too much rain during the sprouting phase. It makes them bitter." He took a small knife from his belt—a tool for whittling, not fighting—and began to slowly, methodically, peel the turnip.
The Crow watched, his void-like eyes unblinking.
"You know," Xiao'ou continued, his tone conversational, "everyone is so worried out there. They think you're some great, terrifying mystery. But you're not, really. You're just… lost."
He finished peeling the turnip, the skin falling in a continuous, perfect spiral to the earth floor. He cut a thin slice and offered it to the Crow. "Hungry?"
The Crow did not react. The offer was beneath notice.
Xiao'ou shrugged and ate the slice himself. "Suit yourself. Your loss. Aunt Hong's pickled turnips are a delicacy." He chewed thoughtfully. "They think you need to be tortured. Or that I need to threaten you. But that's so… dramatic. And loud. I don't like loud things."
He sat down on an upturned bucket, a few feet from the Crow, and began carving the peeled turnip. He wasn't carving anything specific. Just shapes. Curves and lines.
"The problem with silence," Xiao'ou said, not looking at the Crow, but at the turnip in his hands, "is that it's never truly silent. Right now, the wind is whispering secrets to the bamboo outside. The spirit rice is humming a growing song. Your own broken bone is singing a little ballad of pain and regret. You're just choosing not to listen."
The Crow's emptiness remained absolute. This was meaningless noise.
"Your master is out there," Xiao'ou went on, his knife moving with a lazy, practiced ease. "Watching. Waiting for a signal you won't send. He must be so disappointed. A Feeder-Class Crow, bested by a rabbit hole. It's almost funny." He paused and looked at the Crow, a faint smile on his lips. "Actually, it's very funny. I've been chuckling about it all morning."
For the first time, a flicker. A microscopic tremor in the dead sky of the Crow's eyes. Insult. It was a tiny, almost imperceptible crack in the fortress of his mind. The idea that his profound failure was a source of amusement was an attack vector he had no defense against.
Xiao'ou saw it. He didn't press. He went back to his carving.
"You were drawn to the silence of the box, weren't you?" he said, his voice dropping to a near-whisper. "The great, echoing silence after the Thirteenth Question. It must be like a siren's song to you. A beautiful, empty thing you want to fill with your own… nothingness."
He held up the turnip. He had carved it into a perfect, intricate replica of the black-lacquered box, down to the barely-visible seams of the lid.
The Crow's eyes fixed on it. The pull was instinctual, a moth to a flame. The silence of the real box was a distant hum, but this… this crude vegetable facsimile, held by this infuriating boy, seemed to mock the very object of his desire.
"But you see," Xiao'ou said, his voice now taking on a strange, resonant quality, as if multiple people were speaking through him at once, "you misunderstand the silence. You think it's an absence. A void to be claimed."
He brought the tip of his knife to the top of the turnip-box.
"It's not."
He pressed the knife point in.
And in the Crow's mind, a sound erupted.
It was not a loud sound. It was the opposite of loud. It was the sound of the universe inhaling. It was the silent scream of the void before creation, the deafening hush of a breath held for an eternity. It was the sound of the Answer.
It was infinitely more vast, more terrible, and more full than any silence the Crow had ever imagined. Their entire order was based on a fallacy. They were gnats trying to drink an ocean, thinking it was a dewdrop.
The Crow's mental fortress, designed to withstand pain and fear, was utterly unprepared for a metaphysical paradox of this magnitude. It didn't shatter. It unraveled. The sheer, overwhelming presence of that absolute Silence flooded his consciousness, washing away his training, his vows, his very sense of self.
He gasped, a raw, ragged sound. His body convulsed. The dead sky in his eyes shattered, replaced by a terror so profound it was akin to religious awe.
Wei Xiao'ou watched, his expression one of mild interest. "See? Not so silent after all, is it?"
He leaned forward, his voice now gentle, almost sympathetic. "The box is a cage for that sound. You don't want what's inside. Nobody does. Now," he said, his tone becoming practical, "why don't you tell me what I want to know? It will be easier than listening to that, I promise."
The Crow, broken not by pain but by revelation, began to speak. The words were a torrent, spilled from a ruptured soul.
—
Outside, the wait was agonizing. Minutes stretched like taffy. They heard nothing. No screams, no threats, no sounds of a struggle.
"He's been in there too long," Tiezhu fretted, pacing. "What if the Crow has killed him? What if he's using some dark art on his mind?"
Yun Lian shook her head, her violet eyes narrowed in concentration. "No. There's no spiritual disturbance. It's… quiet. Too quiet."
Just as Tiezhu was about to charge in, the shed door creaked open. Wei Xiao'ou emerged, blinking in the sunlight. He looked the same as when he went in: rumpled, sleepy, utterly unremarkable.
"Well?" Tiezhu demanded, grabbing his arm. "What happened? Did he talk?"
Xiao'ou yawned. "A bit. He's very sorry for the trouble. He says his name is… well, it doesn't really translate. But we can call him 'Melon' if we like. He doesn't mind."
Tiezhu stared at him. "Melon?"
"He's had a change of heart," Xiao'ou continued. "He's decided the whole 'Crow of the Unending Shadow' business is a bit pretentious. He's renounced his vows. He'd like to become a turnip farmer."
The entire square fell into a stunned silence. Yun Lian's jaw was slack.
"You're lying," Tiezhu whispered.
Xiao'ou's eyes met his, and for a brief, terrifying instant, Tiezhu saw no laziness, only an infinite, calm depth. "Am I?"
At that moment, the two guards peered into the shed. The Crow—Melon—was sitting exactly where he had been. But his head was bowed, and he was weeping softly, tears cutting clean paths through the grime on his face. The aura of menacing emptiness was gone, replaced by the raw, shattered aura of a penitent.
"By the ancestors…" one of the guards breathed.
Wei San stepped forward, his gaze fixed on his grandson. "What did you do, Xiao'ou?"
Xiao'ou shrugged, the moment of depth gone, replaced by his customary vagueness. "I talked to him. And I listened. It's amazing what people will tell you if you just… offer them a turnip." He held up the intricately carved turnip-box. "See? I made a friend."
He then tossed the turnip to a confused Wei Tiezhu and began to amble away.
"Wait!" Yun Lian called out, her voice sharp. "What did he say?"
Xiao'ou paused, not turning around. "He said the Killers are already on their way. A flight of three. They'll be here by nightfall. They are not coming for the box."
He finally turned, his face serious for the first time anyone could remember.
"They're coming to erase the mistake. They're coming to burn Fragrant Rice Village, and everyone in it, from the face of the earth. They call it 'Scouring the Stain'."
The words hung in the air, cold and final. The hope that had bloomed with the capture of the scout withered and died. Nightfall. They had hours.
Panic, true and utter, began to ripple through the crowd.
"We have to run!" someone shouted.
"Where? They're cultivators! They'll hunt us down!"
"We can't fight them!"
In the midst of the rising chaos, Wei Xiao'ou looked over the terrified faces of his family, his friends, his village. He saw Wei Tiezhu's grim determination, Aunt Hong's protective fury, Grandfather San's deep sorrow, and Yun Lian's resigned guilt.
He sighed, a long, weary sound that seemed to carry the weight of the world.
"All this shouting," he murmured to himself. "So exhausting."
He tapped his rusty umbrella on the ground twice.
Tap. Tap.
The sound was soft, but it cut through the panic like a knife. Every eye turned to him.
"Nobody is running," he said, his voice calm but carrying an undeniable authority that no one had ever heard from him before. "And nobody is being erased."
He looked at Wei Tiezhu. "Cousin. Get every able-bodied person. I don't care if they can channel Qi or just lift a shovel. We have work to do."
He looked at Aunt Hong. "Auntie. Your explosive ducks. I have a proposition for them."
He looked at Yun Lian. "You. You know how they fight. You will advise."
He looked at Fatty Lu, who was wringing his hands near his spirit-cola cart. "Fatty Lu. I need every drop of spirit cola you have. And every empty cask."
Finally, he looked at Grandfather Wei San. "Grandfather. The ancestral hall. There's a diagram carved under the foundation stone of the north-west corner. The one with the chipped edge. Have the children start copying it. Exactly. On every path leading into the village."
For a moment, no one moved. They were staring at a stranger wearing their lazybones' face.
"Well?" Wei Xiao'ou said, a hint of his old, lazy smile returning. "The world isn't going to save itself. And I'd really like to be done in time for my afternoon nap."
That, more than anything, broke the spell. It was so utterly, bizarrely Xiao'ou.
Wei Tiezhu was the first to move. He didn't understand. He didn't need to. The faith he had lost in his cousin's laziness was instantly reinvested in this new, terrifying competence.
"YOU HEARD HIM!" Tiezhu roared, his voice echoing across the square. "MOVE! FOR THE WEI CLAN! FOR FRAGRANT RICE!"
The village exploded into a frenzy of activity, but it was no longer a panic. It was a mobilization. Directed. Purposeful.
Wei Xiao'ou walked to the center of the square, where the Horizontal Immortal crown lay wilted. He picked it up, dusted it off, and placed it back on his head at a jaunty angle.
Then, he began to give orders. His directions were bizarre, nonsensical. He had people digging shallow, meandering ditches that followed no logical defensive pattern. He had them arranging piles of rocks in seemingly random spirals. He had Aunt Hong herding her explosive ducks into specific paddies, scattering special feed that made them unusually placid.
Yun Lian watched, her strategist's mind struggling to comprehend. It wasn't any formation she recognized. It wasn't a battle array. It looked like the work of a madman, or a child playing in the dirt.
"What is he doing?" she asked Wei San, who was overseeing the children as they carefully scratched the strange, looping diagram onto the hard-packed earth of the main path.
The old storyteller watched his grandson, who was now using his umbrella to trace a complex symbol in the air above the village well, a symbol that seemed to make the light bend around it.
"I don't know," Wei San admitted, a wondrous smile on his face. "But for the first time in ninety-nine generations, one of us is not just surviving."
He looked at Yun Lian, his eyes shining with a fierce, proud light.
"He's telling the joke."
—
As the sun began its final descent, painting the sky in the bloody hues of what many feared would be their last sunset, the work was done. The village looked… mostly the same, but with a few odd additions. Shallow ditches, rock piles, ducks sitting contentedly in fields. The children's diagrams were completed at all four entrances to the village.
The villagers were gathered in the square, armed with farming tools, their faces set. The fear was still there, but it was now alloyed with a desperate, bewildered hope.
Wei Xiao'ou stood before them, the willow crown still on his head. He looked tired, but serene.
"Remember," he said, his voice carrying easily in the twilight hush. "No matter what you see, no matter what you hear, do not leave the square. The boundaries are set. Trust the diagrams. Trust the ducks." A few people snorted nervously. "And most of all," he added, a ghost of his lazy smile returning, "trust that I put a great deal of effort into not having to put in any effort later. It would be a shame to waste all that napping time."
He then walked over to the spirit-cola casks, now emptied of their contents and filled with a murky, foul-smelling liquid that Fatty Lu had concocted under Xiao'ou's direction—a concentrate of the fizzing agent, mixed with Granny Mo's most potent sedative herbs and the powdered remains of the Dreamroot pollen.
He rolled one cask to the northern entrance, one to the southern, and one to the eastern. The western entrance, which led deeper into the mountains, he left alone.
"What is the plan, Wei Xiao'ou?" Yun Lian asked, her voice tight. She held the recovered Soul-Thorn, its shadowy blade feeling alien and wrong in her hand.
"The plan," he said, leaning on his umbrella and looking up as the first stars began to appear, "is to be very, very annoying."
He closed his eyes, and for the next hour, he stood there, perfectly still, as if asleep on his feet. The villagers watched him, the tension a live wire in the air.
Then, he opened his eyes.
"They're here."
A moment later, a wave of pure, soul-chilling cold swept over the village. It was not a temperature, but a feeling. A sensation of being watched by something ancient, hungry, and utterly without mercy.
On the northern ridge, three figures appeared, silhouetted against the starry sky. They were taller than Melon, their cloaks seeming to drink the starlight itself. They did not move. They simply stood, their presence an announcement of doom.
The lead Killer raised a hand. A sphere of swirling, silent darkness began to form above its palm, a miniature void that promised absolute obliteration.
Wei Xiao'ou didn't flinch. He yawned.
He then lifted his rusty umbrella and pointed it, not at the Killers, but at the cask of spirit-cola concentrate at the northern entrance.
He tapped the ferrule of the umbrella on the ground.
Click.
A spark, tiny and insignificant, leaped from the tip of the umbrella and shot across the square. It wasn't a bolt of lightning. It was the barest whisper of ignited Qi.
It hit the cask.
The cask did not explode. It erupted.
A geyser of frothing, fizzing, sedative-laced liquid shot into the air, expanding into a thick, clinging mist that smelled overwhelmingly of sweet, rotten fruit and existential despair. The wind, that ever-reliable Jade Mist zephyr, caught the mist and blew it directly into the faces of the three Killers on the ridge.
They froze. This was not an attack. This was… an olfactory assault. A spiritual nuisance. The silent, deadly sphere of darkness in the lead Killer's hand sputtered and vanished, disrupted by the sheer, baffling absurdity of the situation.
From the southern and eastern entrances, identical geysers of foul fizz erupted, carried by the capricious winds, creating a stinking, disorienting fog that began to envelop the village approaches.
The Killers, trained for direct combat and spiritual warfare, were completely unprepared for chemical warfare via carbonated beverage. They hesitated, their flawless coordination broken.
It was then that Wei Xiao'ou tapped his umbrella again.
This time, the children's diagrams carved into the paths began to glow with a soft, silvery light. They weren't attack formations. They were Amplifier Arrays. They took the faint, natural sounds of the night—the chirping of crickets, the rustling of leaves, the snoring of a sleeping villager—and amplified them a thousandfold, focusing the cacophony directly on the disoriented Killers.
The silent night became a roaring, deafening wall of meaningless noise.
The Crows, creatures of silence and shadow, recoiled. It was psychic sandpaper, grinding against their senses.
And then, Wei Xiao'ou gave the final signal to Aunt Hong.
She whistled.
In the spirit fields, the explosive ducks, placid from their special feed, were startled by the sudden, amplified noise. They panicked. And when Aunt Hong's ducks panicked, they did what they did best.
POP! POP-BANG! FWOOMP!
A sporadic, chaotic fireworks display of minor concussive blasts erupted across the fields. It was not powerful enough to harm the Killers, but it was visually disorienting, loud, and combined with the stinking fog and the amplified noise, it created a perfect storm of sensory overload.
The three Killers, the pinnacle of the Crow of the Unending Shadow's assassination corps, stood on the ridge, being assaulted by smelly foam, deafening cricket chirps, and randomly exploding waterfowl.
They were, for the first time in their long, grim careers, completely and utterly bewildered.
Wei Xiao'ou watched from the square, his arms crossed, a satisfied smile on his face.
"See?" he said to a stunned Yun Lian and a speechless Wei Tiezhu. "Annoying."
He then pointed to the western entrance, the only one left clear. "Their coordination is broken. Their focus is shattered. They will fall back to regroup. The path is open. They will take it."
He looked at Yun Lian. "You wanted to know how to fight them? You don't. You confuse them. You break their narrative. You attack their identity, not their body."
As predicted, the three Killers, after a moment of stunned immobility, turned almost as one and retreated, melting into the darkness of the western path, away from the stink, the noise, and the ducks.
The village was silent, save for the last, few pops from the fields. The fog settled. The amplified sounds faded.
They were safe.
The villagers stared at Wei Xiao'ou, their savior, the boy who had repelled three demonic cultivators with fizzy drinks, duck bombs, and loud crickets.
Wei Tiezhu walked up to him, his expression unreadable. He looked at the crown on his cousin's head, at the rusty umbrella in his hand.
"Who are you?" Tiezhu whispered, the question carrying the weight of a lifetime of confusion.
Wei Xiao'ou reached up, took off the Horizontal Immortal crown, and placed it on his cousin's head.
"I'm the one who takes naps," he said simply. "You're the one who stands guard."
He then patted his stunned cousin on the shoulder, yawned so wide his jaw cracked, and ambled towards his home.
"Now, if you'll all excuse me," he called over his shoulder, his voice dripping with exhaustion. "I have a nap to attend to. It's been a very, very long day."
As he disappeared into the night, the village remained in a state of shocked, joyous, disbelieving silence. They had faced annihilation and won, not with a glorious battle, but with a prank of cosmic proportions.
In the turnip shed, the Crow once known as Silent Feathers, now Brother Melon, listened to the retreating silence of his former comrades. He picked up a shriveled turnip from the basket and began to peel it, a slow, meditative smile on his face.
The Laughing Void Sovereign had fought his first battle. And he had won, without ever throwing a punch.